Developed a little more post-surgical pain tonight — no doubt at least partly brought on by the realization that although I’ve yet to fully heal, I’ll have to return to work and school Monday; the show (life) must go on — and so I’m awake and trolling the Internet for a bit.

Noticing a trackback on one of my posts, I backtracked the trackback to a backwater of Martin’s blog that I’d never seen before: Linkdumps.

This lead to an interesting…hour?!? — Martin! What have you done to me!?! — of reading. I skipped the article he’s titled “Three Strikes and We’re Out (of Money)”. After all, I already know that piece; I wrote it.

Not to knock Martin’s re-titling of my article. After all, the title he used is one of the section titles from the piece. And it’s pithier. I considered renaming the post using that less tumid version myself when I first wrote it. But the article actually covers two different kinds of Three Strikes concepts: the one everyone pretty much knows, relating to real people; the other, newer concept, for artificial persons (corporations and such). The pithily-titled subsection covers real people.

As I was reading the eclectic collection with everything from entertaining, but otherwise not-all-that-useful, stories about an interesting psychotic reading Entertainment Weekly and screaming at his computer screen as he blogged the experience (uh, yes, I confess I’ve done the latter before a few times myself) to entertaining, but…oh, uh…hmmm…otherwise not-all-that-useful, stories about less-than-interesting psychos stalking slush-pile readers, I kept thinking how sad it was that every day isn’t twice as long.

For one thing, that would mean that I actually had about 144 hours before going back to work, rather than only 72. But, more importantly, I could read more. “The trouble is,” I mumbled to my computer monitor (uh-oh), “there’s just no good way to know what’s worth reading and what’s not.” The Slush Pile article had probably contributed to my thinking on those lines. After all, if it wasn’t enough hearing about all the slush Ms. Chui had to slog through — and already starting to think of adding her piece to my blog stew — there was the “Related Story” linked at the bottom of page three: “Slush, slush, sweet Stephen.”

There, Laura Miller hazards (don’t take my word for it, read on!),

I’ll hazard [ed. note: see? I told you!] that very few readers walk into their local bookstore, look around, sigh and say, “Is that it?”

Even the most fanatical readers can consume only about 200 books per year, and what most of them want is help in finding the small fraction of worthy books among the 50,000 new titles published annually. And those 50,000 are just the books that have made it past publishing’s gatekeepers: agents and editors. For while agents and editors often misunderstand their market and sometimes reject good or even great works, they do prevent a vast quantity of truly execrable writing from being published. Only those who have actually read unsolicited manuscripts can know the full extent of this horror.

Only 200 books per year! Rats! What I wouldn’t give to be able to read 200 books per year. And yet, there just isn’t time.

Not when I’ve got Martin’s Linkdumps to process.

And my own hopefully entertaining, if not-all-that-useful, blog entries to make about it in addition.